A centralized decentralization: outsourcing in the Turkish cultural
heritage sector
Authors: Daniel David Shoup, Sara Bonini Baraldi, and Luca Zan
Affiliation (all authors): Department of Management/GIOCA Ricerche, University of Bologna, Italy
Word Count: 7229
Abstract: Recently Turkey has experimented with reforming its highly centralized cultural heritage sector by
outsourcing commercial activities at museums and archaeological sites. We examine three outsourcing contracts executed in 2009-2010 and their implications for understanding New Public Management (NPM) in Turkey’s cultural sector. The initial project at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum was soon superseded by a ‘monopoly’ model that outsourced gift shop and ticket collection services at over 50 museums and sites to single companies. All three projects have significantly increased visitor numbers and revenues for the revolving fund that controls commercial operations within the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Dösim). Yet unlike countries such as Italy, where outsourcing has led to decentralization, increased private sector involvement in Turkey has increased the control of the central government. This ‘centralized decentralization’ is a distinctly Turkish approach that allows for modernization without disturbing an highly centralized administrative tradition.
Biography: Daniel David Shoup
Daniel Shoup is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Management, University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan. His current research projects focus on archaeological heritage management in Turkey, salvage archaeology in comparative perspective, and the history of archaeology.
Biography: Sara Bonini Baraldi
Sara Bonini Baraldi is Assistant Professor in the Management Department of the University of Bologna where she teaches for the Graduate Degree in Innovation and Organization of Culture and the Arts. She has done extensive research on the management of cultural heritage in Italy, France, China and Turkey.
Biography: Luca Zan
Luca Zan is Professor of Management at GIOCA, University of Bologna, and teaches at MAM, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He has published extensively in international journals on strategic management and change, management and accounting history, and the management of museums and cultural organizations.
Keywords: cultural heritage, outsourcing, new public management Contact Information:
Daniel Shoup: danieldavid.shoup@unibo.it Sara Bonini Baraldi: sara.boninibaraldi@unibo.it Luca Zan: luca.zan@unibo.it
Department of Management University of Bologna Via Capo di Lucca, 34 40126 Bologna BO ITALY
Corresponding Author:
1. Introduction
Despite the central role of public administration in cultural heritage, debates within the heritage professions have mostly ignored New Public Management (NPM). A series of reforms implemented in the Western world since the 1980s, NPM has aimed to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of the public sector through the introduction of private sector tools and principles, leading in many countries to processes of outsourcing,
privatization, decentralization and managerialization (Hood 1995; Kickert 1997; Pollitt et al. 2007; Pollitt & Bouckaert 2011; Bonini Baraldi 2005).
Scholars of NPM have rarely included the heritage sector in their research agenda focusing instead on general trends in public sector change (Hood 1991, 1995; Stewart and Walsh 1992; Gherardi and Jacobsson 2000), or in specific fields such as health care (Lapsley 1994; Seedhouse 1995; Panozzo and Marcon 2008), or education (see for instance Jarl, Fredriksson and Persson 2011; Guthrie and Neumann 2007; Ouchi et al. 2005; Paletta 2005).
In this paper we discuss the outsourcing of commercial services at cultural heritage sites, which represents one instance of the implementation of NPM reforms in Turkey’s cultural heritage sector. Turkey’s administrative traditions are located between east and west, combining a long history of looking to European examples with one of the most highly centralized administrations in the world. Since 2003, under the moderately Islamist government of the Justice and Development Party (AK Parti), Turkey has seen very rapid economic growth and efforts to modernize the state, including the introduction of NPM rhetoric in Turkish public administration (Göymen 2006; Kapucu and Palabıyık 2008). The most comprehensive effort in this sense was “Law 5227 on the basic principles of public administration and its restructuring”, approved by the Grand National Assembly in 2004. Although it was vetoed by the President and never actually enacted, the basic principles and contents of this law have been implemented in the following years through secondary legal regulations which particularly stressed the need for decentralization (for further details see Bonini Baraldi and Shoup 2012).
These efforts confront deeply entrenched administrative traditions. Since the
foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, centralization has been used to protect the unity and secularism of the state against separatism, Islamism, and the destabilizing effects of extremely uneven levels of economic development between western and eastern Turkey. The AK Parti’s reforms have sparked resistance from parts of the bureaucracy, which perceives them as attacks on the country’s unity and secular tradition. Even after limited devolution, however, the state remains highly centralized: unlike most countries, provinces (il) and
counties (ilçe) are mere peripheral units of the central state, with governors, county-level administrators, and parts of provincial assemblies directly appointed by the Council of Ministers to represent the center at the local level.
Since 2003, NPM reforms in Turkey have also reached the cultural heritage sector, where until recently the state central administration not only managed museums and archaeological sites but also ran all related commercial activities. Some management responsibilities for museums and sites have been devolved to municipalities, while the prominence of museums outside the state sector has increased (Bezmen et al. 1995; Ertürk 2006; Ünsal 2009; Pulhan 2010). Though progress has been uneven, with significant local variations (see Bonini Baraldi and Shoup 2012) and continuing strong centralization, these reforms have sparked resistance among professionals. The historical nexus between centralization, secularism, and cultural policy in Turkey has led any reform that decreases centralization to be characterized as ‘privatization’ (özelleşme) in the press, without clearly distinguishing among different activities such as outsourcing (externalization of services), devolution (transferring responsibilities from the central to the local government),
managerialization (the modernization of public administration itself), and true privatization (sale of cultural property to private owners) (Zan et al. 2007).
This semantic ambiguity has sparked fear among professionals that cultural heritage will be ‘sold’ to private companies for profit (Pulhan 2010; Gursu 2010). These fears have been exacerbated by the government’s periodic declarations that it will privatize cultural institutions – most recently state theaters – even though none of these proposals have actually been implemented (Çetin 2012; Aksoy 2009). A similar situation emerged in the 1990s in Italy, where the 1993 Ronchey law for the outsourcing of heritage services triggered fear and resistance among professionals, but nonetheless led to positive change.
As part of the reform process, the state has been experimenting with outsourcing gift shops, ticket collection, and other commercial activities at cultural heritage sites in Turkey. Building on previous studies of professional and administrative change processes in cultural heritage management from Italy, China, and Peru (Zan 2006; Zan, Bonini Baraldi, Gordon 2007; Guo, Zan and Liu 2008; Zan and Lusiani 2011; Zan and Xue 2011; Bonini Baraldi, Shoup and Zan 2011; Ferri and Zan 2011; Zan and Bonini Baraldi, 2012), this paper assesses the impact of three major outsourcing contracts signed since 2009: the Istanbul Archaeology Museum development project, the national contract for museums and ruins gift shops, and the
national contract for museums and ruins ticket sales and operations.1 Rather than critiquing outsourcing on ideological grounds (especially since direct state intervention has not always been able to ensure quality services) we are interested both the specifics of these experiments and the features that may be unique to the context of Turkish public administration. We find that beneath the ambiguous vocabulary of privatization, a distinct ‘Turkish model’ can be identified that combines the flexibility of private sector procurement with the power of continued strong centralization.
Our field research was conducted between September 2010 and November 2011 and included six in-depth interviews with Ministry of Culture and Tourism officials and managers and staff of the contracting organizations, plus six shorter interviews with museum and heritage professionals and cultural policy experts. We also systematically analyzed public and internal documents and data collected during the course of research in order to reconstruct the administrative framework and financial aspects of each project.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a short description of the administrative context. In Sections 3, 4, and 5 we describe the three outsourcing projects, outlining their initial problems and goals, the basic features of the tenders and contracts, the contractor itself, and achievements so far. In the final discussion, we identify the specific features of the Turkish model of outsourcing and examine its implications for debates on NPM.
2. Administrative Background: Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Dösim
Though several bodies of the central state are involved in cultural heritage, the central role is played by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MoCT), which was formed in 2003 from the merger of the previous ministries of Culture and Tourism. The MoCT’s General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums (GDCHM) has a central organization in Ankara which sets policy and budgets and issues permits for archaeological research. The GDCHM’s Museum Directorates are peripheral entities with responsibility for a specific geographic area. They manage entities such as museums and ruins, protect listed sites, and conduct and monitor excavations, but have little autonomy, with budgets and working rules dictated by the center (Bonini Baraldi et al. in press). There were 102 of these bodies in 2009, controlling 183 museums and 127 ruins open to the public (Dösim 2010; MoCT 2010).
1 Turkish official statistics use the English term ‘ruins’ (Turkish ören yerleri) to refer to archaeological sites that are open to the public.
Underscoring this lack of local autonomy, all commercial activities within the MoCT are operated by the Ministry’s Central Directorate of Revolving Funds, known as DÖSİM (Döner Sermaye İşletmesi Merkez Müdürlüğü). Established in 1979, Dösim directly managed all of the Ministry’s business operations until 2009 (Law 2252). Its commercial activities included ticket sales at museums, ruins, and theaters; the production of gift items, handicrafts, and books; the management of gift shops; space rental at MoCT facilities; and sale of
licensing documents to tour guides and tour operators. Revenue collected is redistributed across the MoCT system based on applications by individual departments. In its structure Dösim resembles the French system (with the central role of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux; see Bonini Baraldi 2005) on which it may have been modelled. As “the body of the Ministry of Culture with the highest budget and employment”, Dösim plays a key role in funding museums and cultural heritage activities (Dösim 2011).
[TABLE 2.1]
In 2009, the last budget year before the implementation of the outsourcing projects discussed here, museum and ruins tickets provided 147 million TL, or 77% of Dösim’s total income of 191 million TL. By contrast, none of its other revenue categories (sharing and contributions, rental and procurement, tourism income, interest, shop/concert/film sales, and other) yielded more than 8.6 million TL (Table 2.1). Given that the total budget of GDCHM was only 157 million TL in 2009, Turkey’s heritage system is in theory almost self-funding (Istanbul 2010 Agency 2009:78). Yet this belies serious overconcentration and
underinvestment within the system. Though 310 MoCT museums and ruins are open to the public, in 2009 ticket revenue from just four sites – Hagia Sophia, Topkapı Palace, the Ephesus ruins, and Hierapolis/Pamukkale – attracted 8.4 million visits (36.5% of the national total) and generated 97 million TL, over half of Dösim’s total income (Dösim 2010, MoCT 2010). At the same time, little of this income was returned directly to cultural heritage: of a total budget of 174.1m TL, Dösim spent only 17.2m TL (9.9%) directly on maintenance at museums and ruins or archaeological research. By comparison “staff and services” consumed 47% of spending, followed by “taxes, fees, and treasury share” (29%) (Table 2.1). In this light museums and ruins seem to be “cash cows” which direct funding to other activities within the Ministry.
This issue was partly outside of Dösim’s control: for instance, 1,415 of its 4,000 employees were assigned to work outside of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in other
government bodies, incurring a cost of 27 million TL in 2009 (Dösim 2009a). In its 2008 and 2009 Annual Reports Dösim reflected on this and other management and budget problems. At that time, many of its operating units, including gift shops and handicrafts sales, were
incurring regular annual losses. A lack of modern infrastructure for selling and accepting tickets, moreover, led to inefficient collection of revenues. Many visitors were entering museums without purchasing tickets, and there were problems with fraud by ticket booth operators, including the production of counterfeit tickets. Dösim staff also had low levels of training, with very few experts and many unskilled workers (Dösim 2009a:12-14, 2010:6-7). As a result many personnel working in museums lacked professional training, tourism experience, foreign language skills, or a “customer service” perspective. Marketing, promotion, and brand identity were also identified as weak (Dösim 2009a:8, 2010:6-7).
The three partnership and outsourcing programs of 2009-2010 sought to overcome these problems. They focused on museums and ruins, given their role as Dösim’s main source of income. The 2009 agreement between Türsab (the Turkish Association of Travel Agents) and Dösim for the modernization of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum represented a sort of “pilot program” in which contract terms, concepts such as revenue sharing, and working procedures were tested. The Türsab/IAM model was quickly superseded by two more
comprehensive outsourcing contracts: one for the construction and operation of gift shops and cafés (2009) and the other for the modernization and operation of ticket gates (2010), each including a ‘package’ of about 50 museums and ruins. In the sections that follow, we consider the details of each program, their interrelationships, and their results.
3. Türsab/IAM Development Project
The Istanbul Archaeological Museum (IAM), founded 1869, is the oldest museum in Turkey (Shaw 2003; IAM 2011). Administered by the Istanbul Archaeological Museum Directorate, the Museum is located on the grounds of Topkapı Palace in the historical peninsula of Istanbul, and holds world-class archaeological collections.
In the mid-2000s IAM faced all of the problems noted by Dösim management: poor customer service, insufficient facilities, and aging infrastructure, all of which were
accentuated by lack of budget autonomy and insufficient staff levels. The museum’s 200,000 annual visitors were many fewer than adjacent the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace
museums, each of which received over 1 million. To develop audience, marketing, and resources, Dösim partnered with the Turkish Association of Travel Agencies (Türsab) to create the Istanbul Archaeology Museums Development Project. Türsab is a not-for-profit
organization established by Turkish law in 1972. Membership is mandatory for Turkish tour operators. Historically focused on sea-and-sun tourism, Türsab became increasingly engaged with cultural heritage from the 1990s, and also provides support for infrastructure at cultural heritage sites and for archaeological conservation.2
Object and structure of the contract
The eight-year IAM Development Project contract was signed in February 2009 and aimed to solve the museum’s outstanding problems. The preface to the contract outlines ambitious goals, including of "reconstruction of the museum to international standards”, “assisting scientific projects”, “solving problems in human resources”, “the care and development of collections”, “improvement of all types of visitor services and museum functions”,
“development of a cooperative and holistic approach to management of commercial activities and visitor services inside and outside the museum”, and “increasing the number of visitors and assist in developing cultural tourism”, among others (MoCT 2009a, Article 1). According to the structure of the contract, the activities to be developed by Türsab for the development of the museum would include the “promotion, services and other works” (MoCT 2009a, Articles 28-30) and “commercial activities” (Articles 31-45).
Non-commercial activities (“promotion, services and other works”) broadly included the support of scientific work, marketing and audience development, and other museum services (Article 29). However, no further explanation of non-commercial activities can be found in the contract, which required that they be specified in two collateral documents: a preliminary document prepared in 2008 by a working group within IAM (article 28), and an 8-year activity plan (Articles 7 and 50) that should be prepared by Türsab within 6 months from the contract signature and implemented through a yearly work program (article 51).3 Commercial activities, by contrast, were detailed in Articles 31-45 both in terms of the type of services anticipated and in terms of income distribution between Türsab and Dösim (see Table 3.1).
[TABLE 3.1]
2 Türsab has been involved in marketing and retail of the Museum Card for Turkish citizens, the 72-hour Istanbul Card for international visitors, sale of discounted museum tickets to travel agencies, financial support for new electronic ticket turnstiles, and the sponsorship of specific sites. See
http://tursab.org.tr/en/Türsab/departmental-activities/support-to-conservation_1074.html.
3 Both documents are inseparable part of the contract and, as confidential documents, they were not provided to the researchers.
For the implementation of the project, Türsab was allowed to make cooperation agreements with third parties and corporations, remaining legally responsible both financially and operationally (article 10). Revenues generated by the activities of Türsab and third party organizations in the scope of the contract "will be used entirely for the museum” (article 6e) meaning that all revenues earned or collected by Türsab within the project must be completely reinvested in the museum itself.
Though never explicitly stated, the contract appears to be a peculiar mix between an outsourcing deal (though there was no public tender), and a “sponsorship” agreement.4 On the one side Türsab can establish and manage all commercial activities related to the museum, ensuring Türsab itself a share of the income. On the other side, it requires Türsab to expand the institution’s potential by reinvesting the income from commercial activities, Türsab’s own investment, and Türsab fundraising from third parties back into the museum.
However, while both the operational and financial aspects of commercial activities were strictly defined, the “sponsorship” element remains in the backstage of the contract, with no detailed description of the expected activities or results. Moreover, the “sponsorship” aspect was not based on an explicit financial agreement, and did not commit either party to spend specific resources. As the Project Director put it, “for all non-commercial activities Türsab is expected to spend a minimum amount of money (‘not less than’ a certain amount), but this amount is defined case by case, without being agreed in the contract.”5
Initial reactions and results
To implement the agreement, a project office of Türsab employees (17 in 2010, 12 in 2011), was established at the IAM, supported by a six-member scientific committee. The project office relies on Türsab headquarters for important decisions (professional services, budget decisions, expenditure approval, preparation of financial statements). Its activities are closely monitored by Dösim, the Regional Conservation Council, and IAM management. Three subcontractors provided additional services: Kenet for the cafeteria and catering, Delano for the gift shop, and Biletall for audioguides. Türsab directly managed museum ticket and Museum Card sales and facilities rental in 2010, though ticket sales were removed from the contract in 2011 and placed into the new national ticket gates contract. The project created 4 While we are aware of the ambiguity of the term “sponsorship”, we use it here in the meaning given to it by the Project Director during our interviews (Interview with Köyüm Özyüksel, May 20, 2011 and following), which suggested that Türsab’s financial investment is mainly aimed at supporting Museum development and not at profitmaking for Türsab itself.
strong initial results: visitor numbers increased from 207,748 in 2008 to 372,608 in 2010, while ticket income more than doubled from 1,041,377 in 2008 to 2,491,135 in 2010. These positive results are no doubt related to Türsab’s major marketing and audience development efforts (enhancement of the website, opening of a Facebook page, advertising for permanent and temporary exhibitions), but also may be connected to better control of ticket gates and to the “halo effect” of Istanbul’s status as European Capital of Culture for 2010.
The Türsab project office provided us with revenue results for 2010 and 2011. The inflows from activities managed by Türsab in 2010 totaled 3,259,047 TL (around €1.6
million). Of this, about half (54%) was derived from by museum tickets, followed by museum cards (21%), gift shop sales (12%), cafeteria sales (9%), event catering (2%), and audioguides and space rental (both 1%) (Table 3.3). Türsab and its subcontractors earned 1,407,462 (43% of total income), of which Türsab’s actual revenue was 796,337 TL (24%, see Table 3.2). 2011 results look strikingly different due to the removal of ticket revenues: total income dropped to 1,290,906 TL. However, other sales categories showed growth: 22% in gift shop sales, 37% in cafeteria sales, 552% in audioguide sales, and 123% in catering. Rental income decreased 21%. As a result the total income for Türsab and its subcontractors grew to
1,558,442 TL. Türsab’s revenue, however, dropped to only 176,906 (Table 3.2). [TABLE 3.2]
The Türsab-IAM Project profit-loss statement for 2010 gives us some insight as to where this revenue stream was allocated in 2010 (Table 3.3). Though it does not fit with the sales figures in all particulars (sales numbers differ from those in Table 3.2), it does detail spending categories, showing a loss of 579,435 TL for the year. This sum represents Türsab’s actual investment in the IAM. Though this seems to support the Project Director view that the IAM Development Project was “not a for-profit but a poetic project”6, there is also the possibility that this ‘loss’ simply represents the cost of the Türsab office and project staff, rather than real investment in the development of new activities within the Museum. For instance, the “general management assistance costs” and “general management costs” total over 1.3 million TL, but only 103,234 TL was spent on “archaeology museum activity costs”.
[TABLE 3.3]
Several marketing, audience and scientific projects were in fact developed during 2010, including small educational projects for children, infrastructure for the disabled, logistics and communications for an exhibit opening, and small equipment purchases. However, the restoration project for the IAM main (‘Classical’) building – the core of the sponsorship project – did not begin until November 2011. This project has a preliminary budget of 13 million TL which is likely to double.7 According to the IAM/Türsab
development project manager, delays in beginning the project were mainly due to
bureaucratic obstacles (especially project revision requests by the Regional Conservation Council, an autonomous body of MoCT that reviews development interventions at listed monuments) and were outside of Türsab’s control.8 Seen from another point of view, the contract appears as a sort of sponsorship option for Türsab, without any explicit commitment of resources in clear terms.
Reactions have been strong since the project was first proposed. Museum staff were initially very suspicious and reluctant to work with the Türsab project office, though the relationship has improved over time. Though Türsab paints it as a kind of “poetic project” (given its substantial sponsorship plans), the press and the scientific community have accused Türsab of supposedly earning large profits.9 Others accuse Türsab of taking the project in order to secure the right to redevelop the adjacent Imperial Mint (Darphane) building as a series of gift shops, in order to create a profit center for tour agencies.10
Though initially intended as a national model, the IAM/Türsab development project seems to be an incomplete experiment. The contract itself is a peculiar mix between an outsourcing deal and a sponsorship agreement, but the sponsorship part was significantly postponed. Though the initial results of the project are positive, the nature of the contract changed in 2010 when Dösim decided to switch to a single contractor, multi-museum model for
outsourcing gift shops and ticket services. Besides supplanting the Türsab/IAM agreement as a model, these outsourcing initiatives also placed ticket gate revenues at IAM under another contract. Since ticket and Museum Card revenues made up about two-thirds of the IAM Development Project’s revenues, the project has since become something closer to a pure sponsorship project.
7 Interview with Köyüm Özyüksel, November 21, 2011.
8 Interview with Köyüm Özyüksel, May 20th 2011.
9 Interview with anonymous source, May 3rd, 2011.
10 Türsab staff say that they would indeed like to develop the darphane (mint) building, but as additional depot and exhibit space for the IAM itself within the scope of the contract.
4. Outsourcing the Gift Shop
Even as the sponsorship agreement for IAM was taking shape in late 2008, Dösim
management was considering how to expand and improve its gift shops. Before 2009 there were only nine such shops at the 310 MoCT museums and sites. These were losing about $2 million per year, had poor quality products and delivered low levels of customer service (Dösim 2009a, 2010). In 2008 the idea of outsourcing these services emerged: as Dösim General Director Murat Usta observed, “the state was not functioning well as a manager. We wanted to coordinate instead of managing; we decided some red lines, policies, and goals.” The logic of outsourcing included not only profit but effectiveness, as Usta noted: “our operation would be half to increase income, and half to increase the number and quality of products.”11
Dösim published an tender for gift shop operations at 55 museums and archaeological sites on January 7, 2009 (Dösim 2009b).12 The contract was to run through 2016, a total of 8 years. The tender aimed to “secure resources for the conservation and development of our cultural heritage”, “to offer trademarked modern and traditional designs and copies of objects related to museums and ruins, in order to strengthen cultural communication with visitors”, and “to enrich visitor experience by developing strongly representative sales areas, goods and services that that fit the understandings of modern museology” (Article 3). As in the IAM contract, the goals mix revenue concerns with a desire to improve marketing and visitor services, though the logic is more openly commercial and the activities are much more explicitly defined. The contractor was to make investments in infrastructure and manage the shops under a revenue-sharing formula. A minimum fixed amount per year would be
guaranteed to Dösim by the contractor; above this amount, Dösim and the contractor would share revenues based on fixed percentages of each product category (Dösim 2009c).13
The tender also defined a set of additional conditions for strategic marketing and local procurement. Three kinds of “strategic” products were to be developed and sold in all shops: Turkish handicrafts, Turkish delight (lokum), and Turkish coffee. Moreover, goods were to reflect the culture of Turkey and ancient Anatolian civilizations, including reproductions of famous artifacts (Article 9.5). Even more strictly, “60% of the products offered for sale [at a given shop] will be inspired by that same Museum or Ruin, and 40% will be related to another 11 Interview with Murat Usta, 25.05.2011, Dösim, Ankara
12 Note that the tender was published one month before the signing of the IAM Development Project contract.
13 The final contract is considered a trade secret and is not available to the public; here we discuss the draft contract document, kindly provided to us by Dösim.
museum and ruin and/or have essentially cultural characteristics” (Article 9.9). Goods made in China, moreover, were specifically prohibited out of quality concerns.14
Stringent procedural mechanisms are also defined for monitoring the contractor, including a delivery protocol with documents detailing “work program, renovation and construction work, furnishing, decoration, technological infrastructure, and related work and a relevant timeline”. A yearly work plan was to be submitted in January of each year. Dösim was to approve third-party relationships (that is, subcontracting) and inspect the Contractor’s work, account and documents, while an independent auditor would check its books (Article 22).
From this short summary a much different outsourcing model emerges compared to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum project, with three distinct elements. First, Dösim explicitly wanted a single contractor for over 50 sites, in the belief that it would create
‘coordination’ and ‘synergy’: “activities covered in the tender will be implemented by a single party, with the highest level of coordination that will create synergy among [commercial] activity areas and the included museums and ruins” (Article 4). Second, a composite portfolio of museums and ruins were outsourced all together, including both ‘cash cows’ and little-visited sites, with the contractor acting as clearing house between more and less profitable locations. Finally, despite formal outsourcing, Dösim retained strong control over financial expectations and defining the product mix.
[Table 4.1]
Profile of the contractor: BKG
Applicants were evaluated on a 100-point basis, divided between activity project and financial terms, as described in Table 4.1. Two entities that Dösim had invited to apply declined, perceiving the process and outcomes as too complicated and uncertain. The winner of the contract was BKG (Bilkent Kültür Geliştirme or Bilkent Cultural Development), part of a group of companies owned by Bilkent University in Ankara. The first private university in Turkey, Bilkent was founded in 1984 by Ihsan Doğramacı, who established subsidiary companies to support the academic activities of the university. At present one-third of students at the University are on scholarships funded by the commercial activities of the Bilkent Group, which includes construction, tourism, catering, and hotel businesses.15 14 Interview with Murat Usta, 25.05.2011, Dösim, Ankara
Despite the rhetoric of transparency that is becoming common in Turkey, the precise contents of the Dösim-BKG contract are considered a commercial secret, and not available to the public. However, Dösim provided us with a summary of contract terms and the revenue-sharing formula agreed between the parties, allowing to make some preliminary comments (Table 4.2).
[Table 4.2]
Initial achievements and results
In October 2009 a few gift shop and café sites were opened on an experimental basis. By the end of 2010, 47 gift shops and 29 cafeterias were in operation, making BKG the world’s largest private museum shop operator. By its nature, the initial set-up period was dominated by the shop design and bureaucratic procedures (we were told that “about 40 official
signatures for opening each shop” are required).16 In terms of financial performance, it has been a period of major investment; ‘normal’ running costs and revenues will be evident only over a longer period. To date BKG has developed about 10,000 distinct products in order to meet the 60% local theme requirement. Sourcing this number of products has entailed a huge effort to recruit artisans and renew local handicraft communities.
The project met resistance at some locations. At Ephesus, merchants with gift shops outside of the ticket area sued to stop BKG from opening a shop inside the gates (the lawsuit is ongoing). At Pergamon, local merchants hung signs protesting “monopolies” near the entrance gates of the acropolis, while at Didyma the local mayor intervened to stop
construction of the BKG shop. At several other sites, the BKG shop was ultimately placed in a poor location after a bargaining process with local authorities. Finding over 50 qualified shop managers, especially for archaeological sites in remote areas, was also unexpectedly challenging. On the other hand, there were also positive surprises, such as the development of cafés at many sites, which was not anticipated in the original tender nor the draft contract, but was negotiated after the contract began. In substantive terms, the goal of increasing service levels and the quality of visitors’ experience seems to be already achieved: the authors have visited over a dozen of the shops and found them to be well-designed with friendly customer service and an appealing range of quality products.
The economic benefit for BKG is still unclear. Our impression is that there was no clear-cut budgeting prior to implementation of the contract. The degree of profitability will 16 Interview with Barış Üstünkaya, 17.05.2011, BKG office, Istanbul.
emerge from implementation, perhaps requiring a few years to understand the intrinsic business model and fine-tune management details and product mixes. Though BKG expects to eventually make a profit, a certain sponsorship logic remains: as the director of product development told us, “if you were to ask me as a person to invest with you in the BKG project, I wouldn’t do it. There are better ways to make money solely.”17 For Dösim, however, the project is already paying off: after losing around 4 million TL on its gift shops in 2008, its revenue share was 2.3 million TL in 2010, and around 900,000 TL for the first five months of 2011. The projected gross revenues to BKG in the life of the contract were 464 million TL, of which Dösim expected to receive around 75 million (Table 4.3).18 The size of BKG’s profit is unknown; it is possible, in fact, that the project was intended as a loss-leader that would improve the overall relationship between the Bilkent companies and the state.
[Table 4.3 here] 5. Türsab-MTM Ticket Gates Contract
As noted above, by 2008 Dösim management had become aware of problems in the
management of ticketing at museums and ruins. Despite the central role of museums and ruins in Dösim’s income stream and rapidly increasing visitor numbers, only 23 of Dösim’s 230 paying sites had modern entry systems with electronic turnstiles and security cameras. Ticket design was inconsistent and printed tickets often lacked security features, allowing them to be easily counterfeited. Data on visitors was not collected at many sites, and a lack of ticket gate discipline meant that many sites under-reported the true number of visitors and were
vulnerable to skimming by employees.19 Dösim management believed that they were losing revenues because of these problems, and also missing opportunities to improve management due to the lack of visitor data from sites (Dösim 2009a, 2010).
The tender and contract conditions
17 Interview with Barış Üstünkaya, 17.05.2011, BKG office, Istanbul
18 The Turkish source of these numbers is ambiguous, however: an alternative interpretation could be that the revenue share should steadily increase after the start up phase, with 169 million TL of fixed contribution, plus a forecast of 75 million TL for revenue sharing.
19 In conversation with ticketing staff at several ruins before 2009, one of the authors (Shoup) found that they often allowed groups of local visitors to enter without tickets, since paying museum tickets for visiting guests can be a serious financial hardship, especially in rural area where a cash economy is underdeveloped. The museum card program was partly introduced to address the relatively higher expense of museum visits for Turkish citizens.
The outsourcing tender, published in summer 2010, sought to address these issues by outsourcing ticket sales and infrastructure. The tender included 48 of the most-visited
museums and ruins in Turkey, comprising a total of 52 ticketing units.20 The project includes the most-visited sites in Turkey (with exception of Pamukkale). Three ‘tiers’ of sites are visible: three mega-sites (Topkapı, Hagia Sophia, and Ephesus) with over 1 million visitors; 28 major sites with 100,000-650,000 visitors; and 17 smaller sites with 25,000 to 100,000 visitors (Table 5.1). The units in the bid accounted for 63% of visitors and 85% of revenue from museum and ruins – and 66% of Dösim’s total revenue from all sources in 2009.
As in the BKG program, the tender itself included three documents: managerial tender conditions, technical tender conditions, and a contract outline (Dösim 2009f). Like the other two projects, the tender will last until the end of 2016, slightly more than six years. Article 2 identifies the goals as: increasing revenues to create additional funds for cultural heritage development and research, raising visitor numbers at museums and ruins, and improving visitor services to improve Turkey’s image and that of the sites themselves.
The contract also used a revenue-sharing logic: the contractor would pay Dösim a guaranteed sum each year, plus a fixed percentage of additional income. In addition, the contractor would be responsible for upgrades to infrastructure and technology. As the Dösim director reflected, “in the technical terms [for the contract] we made collecting clean data a major priority.” Ticket booths were to be renovated to accept cash, credit card, mobile phone, and foreign currency payments. Ticket gates were to use improved software and hardware to ensure efficient and comprehensive data collection, provided on a real-time basis to Dösim headquarters in Ankara. In addition, the contractor was to work with Dösim to implement new museum card programs aimed at Turkish citizens and visitors to Istanbul. Though the
contractor would do design, marketing, and day-to-day management of these programs, Dösim retained control over ticket prices, discount conditions, Museum Card prices, museum and ruins opening hours, and group ticket sales conditions (Dösim 2009a, Article 29.2).
[TABLE 5.1]
The tender was published in summer 2010, with submissions due by 13 September 2010. Bidders on the tender were required to submit a master plan for work under the contract (the ‘Activity Plan’) along with 12 detailed proposals for implementing specific aspects of the 20 Several museums and ruins have supplementary tickets within the same site, as at the Topkapı Palace Harem or the Ephesus Terrace houses.
contract. Bids were evaluated on a 100-point scale, with 50 points allocated based on the quality of the proposals and the other 50 based on financial guarantees and revenue sharing formula (Dösim 2009a, Articles 8.7.3, 29.5) (see Table 5.2). The minimum guarantee to Dösim was 100,000,000 TL per year through 2016 (Article 8.8). The winner was to submit a work program to Dösim within 30 days of winning the bid, and all ticket gates were to be turned over to the control of the contractor within 180 days of the signing of the agreement (Article 22).
[TABLE 5.2]
The Winner: Türsab
Four bidders entered the tender, including Bilintur (the parent company of BKG), Akfen Tourism (a major airport contractor), Göçtaş Tourism, and Türsab/MTM. The Türsab/MTM joint venture was announced as the winner on 29 September 2010. Türsab has been discussed above; its partner MTM Information Software and Security Technology SA has previous experience providing information systems, entrance control systems, holographic printing, and surveillance software for major clients including NATO and the Turkish Ministry of Defense (MTM Security 2011).
[TABLE 5.3]
Though the contract itself is considered a trade secret, a Dösim press release provided some details of the final agreement. The estimated yield of the program was 1.57 billion TL (267 million per year) between 2011 and 2016. Türsab would retain an 11% share (172.9m TL over 6 years), while Dösim received 89%, or 1.39 billion TL. The guaranteed minimum revenue was 180.7m TL in 2011, growing to 282.6m TL by 2016 (Table 5.3).
Out of its share, Türsab would make a projected investment of 18 million TL in the first six months, which would renovate 45 existing and build 11 new ticket buildings and install 196 cameras, 214 turnstiles, and 18 automatic ticket kiosks. The project would also create 257 jobs. The press release estimated that work at 26 sites would be completed by the end of January 2011, 13 more by the end of February, and the remaining 11 sites by 25 March (Dösim 2009e). Notably, the projected infrastructure investment is very small in respect to the projected income (1.1% of turnover).
Results so far
At the time of research, only partial-year financial results of the program were available. To May 25, 2011, the sites included in the contract showed a year-on-year increase of 35% in income and 24.5% in visitors (see Table 5.4 for examples).21 Dösim management believes that these results derived mostly from better control of visitors and tickets, rather than from a large increase in real visitor numbers.22 The Museum Card + and Istanbul City Card programs were introduced in late 2011, but no sales figures were available at the time of writing (MoCT 2011).
[Table 5.4]
Dösim perceives the program as a success so far: year-on-year revenues have increased substantially at no cost to itself, and new technological tools allow more control over individual ticket sales. After the first month of operations, Türsab already estimated that the number of illegal entries to museums and ruins had declined by 84% (Kuburlu 2011). In the press, several newspaper articles highlighted abuses by ticket-gate staff in the preceding period, with an implicitly positive stance toward the new system. Two former employees of Topkapı Palace, for instance, were on trial for embezzlement of ticket money that was allegedly spent on gambling and prostitution in Cyprus and Europe (Turizm Güncel 2011). Total revenues from the project in 2011 were reported to be 223,416,614 TL, exceeding the contractual minimum by almost 25%.23
6. Discussion
Before addressing similarities and differences with outsourcing processes taking place elsewhere, we note that two different waves of outsourcing can be identified within the same time-frame (early 2009): on the one hand, the Türsab/IAM model of outsourcing a single museum service, and on the other hand the ‘national’ model of outsourcing a specific service to a single contractor across the country, which seems to have immediately overcome the first (see Table 6.1 for a synopsis). While the contract already signed for the IAM/Türsab project will remain valid until its end in 2016, our understanding is that no further contracts for service provision at individual sites would be initiated (though simple sponsorships or 21 Available data covered operating periods of between 46-147 days, varying by the date of installation of the new equipment at different sites.
22 Interview with Murat Usta, 25 May 2011, Dösim, Ankara
donations remain welcome). Understanding the reasons and processes for this change of models in service provision deserves further investigation.
Table 6.1 Outsourcing in Turkish Cultural Heritage: a synopsis
IAM/Türsab Gift Shops Tickets
Problems & Goals Renovate museum Improve visit quality Develop commercial activities
Raise money for the museum
Improve Income
Increase quality of visit Poor services Poor data collection Ticket evasion
Increase revenue, data, ticket options Contract/Tender conditions Focused on IAM: - Outsourcing (profit sharing) & - “Sponsorship” Portfolio of entities (55) Minimum+Profitsharing Additional conditions: - strategic products - local products - control Portfolio of entities (53) Minimum+Profitsharing The contractor/ winner Türsab (professional association) BKG (subsidiary of private university) Türsab/MTM (professional
association with private sector partner)
Initial achievements Positive in service Delays in “sponsorship” Investment by Türsab in the Project (“financial loss” for Türsab)
47 shops & 29 cafés 10,000 new products Improved service Profit for Dösim Still start-up phase for BKG
Increase in revenues Increase in visitors Introduction of Istanbul city card
When one focuses on the outsourcing of services (leaving aside the “sponsorship” component, the Türsab/IAM project resembles the typical process of outsourcing in the museum sector. In the Italian experience, for instance, museum activities are outsourced “horizontally” at the level of one individual museum or site (Table 6.2), usually to an ad hoc joint venture of various service providers. A whole set of activities, for instance, were outsourced in Pompeii, the Uffizi in Florence, and in Venice. Important differences from the Italian experience still remain, however: not only in the confusion between service provision and sponsorship activities, but above all in the relative lack of structure in the IAM contract. The tender of outsourcing at the Venice municipal museums, for instance, was almost a “book”, defining very clearly the expected services to be provided, the conditions and standards, while the IAM contract leaves the specifics to later negotiation. In any case, the IAM/Türsab project reveals another element of the Turkish model, which is the minor role of local institutions compared to agencies of the central state (Dösim and MoCT) in defining and administering the contract. Had this initial wave of outsourcing been replicated, a possible consequence could have been the establishment of a variety of specialized entities in competition to provide services for various sites and museums.
However, in the gift shop and ticket contracts, which strongly resemble each other, Dösim chose another model that has precluded this scenario. Though Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertuğrul Günay characterized the outsourcing process in the Türsab/Ticket Gates contract as “the model used in Europe” (Turizm Güncel 2010), we suggest that the two contracts instead form a separate “Turkish model” of outsourcing that differs from the experience of other nations and from practices typically discussed in the academic literature. It is, in fact, a very centralized decentralization. For instance, it is the center (Dösim) and not individual museums/sites that runs the tender, benefits from revenue sharing, and controls the implementation of the outsourcing contract. A logic of a “portfolio of sites” (including more and less profitable ones) is performed in the contract, with contractors serving as a sort of clearing house between rich and poor museums and sites. The contract, moreover, is vertically specialized, outsourcing only one activity (gifts shops in one case; ticketing in the other), and Finally, the control of implementation is strictly kept in the hand of the center (Dösim).
Table 6-2 Horizontal and Vertical Decentralization
Two patterns of outsourcing:
- Horizontal (the Italian model): individual sites/museums are in charge of outsourcing the whole set of activities, usually to a joint venture of various service providers, on a local basis
- Vertical (the Turkish model): one activity (e.g. ticketing) is outsourced nationwide to a single provider by the center (e.g. Dösim to BKG for Gift shop; Dösim to Türsab for tickets)
This approach includes both pros and cons. In terms of positive aspects, one could consider it an efficient use of a resource scarce at the national level: managerial know-how and organizational capabilities. In this light, using a single vendor is a means of accelerating capacity building with minimal investment by the state. In addition, the centralized solution is easier from the point of view of local administration, since extensive reforms are not required to the already highly centralized system. The model also provides a centralized control capacity which is – when it works – indeed impressive, illustrating that centralization is a
value not only in negative terms. As an example, we can report our experience visiting the office of Dösim director Murat Usta in Ankara. When asked about data collection he showed us his computer monitor, where he receives updates every 30 seconds on ticket sales at museums, live information on sales of books and other products at gift shops, and view real-time video feed from any of the security cameras at ticket gates. It was an impressive display, suggesting that where centralization functions well, it can provide a powerful management tool.
But there are also drawbacks involved, among which is the establishment of a few noncompeting monopolies that will lack incentives in future tender competitions. There are moreover no incentives for BKG and Türsab to collaborate in developing the value and attractiveness of an individual site. But most of all, this approach seems to freeze further opportunities for decentralization until at least 2017. The idea of museum/site autonomy seems to be ‘off the radar’ in Turkey, completely off the political agenda. Given that the main commercial activities at the most important museums and sites have been already outsourced (to the benefit of the center) means that, in the (unlikely) option that a single entity was given autonomy, they would have no control over major local revenue streams or opportunities to increase their earnings.
7. Concluding remarks
Outsourcing without decentralization: this is the distinct – and potentially risky – element of these projects, rather than heritage professionals’ ideologically-rooted fear of
commercialization or profit-making at museums and sites. This uniquely Turkish model provides some interesting insights for the broader debate within New Public Management on the transformation of the public sector in different countries. Though the usual modernizing rhetoric of transparency, accountability, and efficiency is deployed here, Turkey’s agenda for public sector change is not coupled with the idea of decentralization, but focused on building managerial capacity within the centralized state.
What we see is the modernization of a central administration in ways that are far more centralized than elsewhere (a centralized decentralization, as we define it). In this sense the creativity of the Turkish approach is impressive: it reconciles the need for modernization without disturbing the basic features of an highly centralized administrative tradition. To what extent this “original” solution could be a benchmark for other developing countries, who may be less oriented toward decentralized decision-making and less willing to consider forms of governmental pluralism, remains unclear. There is also a potential conflict with Turkey’s
growing NGO sector: locally-driven cultural policy initiatives have sought (especially in Istanbul) to expand civic participation in cultural heritage (e.g. Ada et al. 2011), but these outsourcing projects reinforce central control, forestalling local participation. This case study illustrates the need for further international comparison, if possible involving countries and experiences out of the usual Western bias in public management research.
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